Why are there more and more people with kidney disease? These kidney-damaging behaviors are things many people are doing now—stop them while you still can. Don’t wait until you regret it on dialysis! What’s truly frightening about kidney damage is that you don’t even know it’s already getting worse. In each of our kidneys, there are about 1 million nephrons. It sounds like a lot, but when one dies, there’s one less—never regenerating over a lifetime.